Though Ween spent over a decade growing into one of America's biggest cult bands, renowned for a live show of bad taste and dizzying chaos, this is a curiously tame, professional fair. Brothers Dean and Gene blow through a lengthy 26-song set with flawless musicianship, but with the passion of a band who know they are knocking on and that the juvenile japes are wearing thin. One for Ween devotees.
Recorded in March, this is the same stylish stage show that Sparks brought to London earlier this year. Built around the Li'l Beethoven set, you also get a big helping of bonus tracks from that beguiling back catalogue, including the scarily prescient "The Calm Before The Storm". The motorik medley of "The Number One Song In Heaven" and "Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth" takes some beating.
Now that Oasis have been written into British rock history alongside The Beatles, The Sex Pistols and all those other elder statesmen they so publicly admired and absorbed, 1984's Definitely Maybe survives as a revered, although sometimes distant, memory. These days when Oasis play Glastonbury, there are waves of excitement but no huge hullabaloo about their perfunctory parade of greatest hits, and their albums have ceased to generate the expectation, the queues around the block in Oxford Street, that was once the norm.
Talk about narrow fucking escapes. Halfway through one of the interviews with Brian De Palma that make up the raft of extras on this special edition of his lavish gangster epic, the director mentions that Paramount's first choice for the central part of Eliot Ness was Mel Gibson. It's an appalling thought. I mean, imagine Mel hamming it up here, his narcissistic gurning turning De Palma's operatic vision into mugging farce. Fortunately, Mel had other commitments, and the role of Ness, as De Palma had always intended, went to the then relatively unknown Kevin Costner.
After falling out with Tarantino over the credits for Pulp Fiction, Roger Avary made this violent Paris-set heist movie in a bid to establish his creative autonomy. It was hammered by critics, who dubbed it "Reservoir Frogs" and dismissed Avary as derivative. Zoe's better than its reputation suggests, though, and has the added pleasure of Jean-Hugues Anglade going spectacularly bonkers as a smack-shooting gang leader.
Since 24, the world's somehow overlooked Steven Bochco's ice-breaking 23-part epic series (here on six discs), which traced the ricocheting ramifications of a Hollywood murder trial in obsessive detail, locking us into addictive characters with exquisite week-on-week suspense. Daniel Benzali is the snidey-but-good lawyer, Stanley Tucci the reptilian suspect millionaire. It still ensnares you. Good as it gets.
Elmore Leonard's first modern fiction novel was originally filmed in 1969 with Ryan O'Neal in the starring role. It flopped. This remake (directed by Miami Blues' George Armitage) fares no better; it drifts aimlessly, while Owen Wilson's small-time crook, drawn into a relationship with the thrill-seeking girl of a local property developer, never engages your feelings. Morgan Freeman, Charlie Sheen and Vinnie Jones co-star.
From the mid-'30s, the film-makers' film-maker at his peak. Le Crime De Monsieur Lange is a hymn to the rebellious working class. La Bête Humaine (based on Zola's novel) is a prototype noir, with train driver Jean Gabin seduced by murderous Simone Simon. WWI classic La Grande Illusion casts Gabin as a POW bent on escaping a German camp run by Erich von Stroheim. It was banned by Goebbels, who labelled it "cinematographic enemy No 1".
The epitome of love-it-or-hate-it cinema, Mark and Michael Polish's surreal account of a mid-'50s Montana town about to be submerged by dam waters has absolutely no hook for the viewer other than sheer admiration for the beauty of the landscape, a gutsy disregard for narrative pacing and the detached Lynchian performances. Proudly unique, nonetheless.
Cocteau's dissection of the decadence of youth may be an acquired taste, but in 1949 it must have been quite a shocker. Callow siblings Nicole Stéphane and Edouard Dhermithe sow emotional havoc with their quasi-incestuous games, and reap tragedy with the help of Cocteau's narrator. An atypical first film from director Jean-Pierre Melville.
